The Google Play Music Upload matching service is still not working. It’s been almost 2 months? Do they no longer match uploaded music? Does it not work from Canada? I don’t see anyone else complaining about it, but it worked fine up until January.

This came up last year, but it seems that the Auto-matching service for Google Music uploading is down again. I tried uploading 22 albums yesterday and not a single song was matched. Same thing happened today. These were all FLAC files which generally have a much higher match rate. They were also fairly popular artists like The Weeknd & Radiohead.

I guess I will have to try again after a couple of days. Last year it took at least 3 days to get it running again.

In previous cycles, you would pop kernels for contest entries with the occasional instant prize being won. This year, you have to pop kernels to win wedges, which are like a partial prize. You have to “earn” 3 or 4 wedges to win any one prize. Sometimes you will get all 3 or 4 wedges for one item in a single game, giving you an “Instant” prize.

Initially, the game was more challenging on a mobile or tablet. In a desktop browser, it was considerably easier. For the most part I was able to pop over 200 kernels per game using a mouse. Unfortunately, being able to pop that many kernels didn’t seem to increase the amount of wedges you could win. Whether you popped 50 or 200 you always seem to end up with 3 to 5 wedges. If you don’t pop all of your potential wedges during regular play, you get an extra chance to pop a bonus kernel, where the system would give you the remaining wedges.

Anyway, I tried again today after not playing since last week and holy crap, they quickly ramp up the speed now. I can only hit maybe 40 to 45 kernels!

Luckily any wedges you miss during regular play seem to come up with the bonus kernels. I’m still getting 3 to 5 wedges per play. I used to be able to play better than 100% of all Canadians according to the end game message. I guess they got wise and tweaked the game-play.

This morning I noticed that OneDrive was feverishly working away while I worked. I hadn’t made any changes to my OneDrive folder, so it didn’t make much sense. I stupidly let it be thinking it was just doing some maintenance.

Well, at the end of the day I went to retrieve a file and found that several folders were missing. Upon closer inspection I found that most of my files were gone!

I looked online (https://onedrive.live.com) and they were all still there, just not on my local computer. That’s when I checked my Recycle Bin and found over 26 000 files had been deleted from my OneDrive folder.

The files are mostly small and only make up about 3.5 GB. Anyway, I was able to restore them from the Recycle Bin and all is well.

Makes me a little concerned about what the hell OneDrive was thinking.

After converting almost 16 000 MP3s to a lower bit-rate using TAudioConverter, I realized I forgot to check off “add encoder suffix to created folders”.

This resulted in hundreds of folders with “_Lame” tacked on to the end of each folder name.

I started picturing renaming them all by hand and decided to search out something that could do it for me.

Google brought me to http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk and the Bulk Rename Utility. The name isn’t very imaginative, but it’s free and it worked perfectly. It only took a second or two once I figured out the interface, which isn’t exactly clean.

My only complaint is that the logging function doesn’t appear to work. I thought it was a permissions issue, but moving it to a non-system folder didn’t make a difference. I used the Portable version if that makes a difference.

I took the kids to see Ant-Man last night (which was great by the way) and we were shocked to realize that before getting to the “Coming Soon” trailers, there were 4 ads for Bell Mobility and 3 automobile ads.

4 freaking ads for Bell in the span of a few minutes. Seriously, it was Jeep, Bell, Interact, Bell, Mazda, Bell, Toyota and finally another Bell ad.

I’m not a fan of Coke or Pepsi. I don’t mind some Root Beer if I feel like something sweet (I prefer A&W over Barq’s), but my favourite soda is Canada Dry Ginger Ale.

Despite having a lot less sugar than other soft drinks, it still has quite a bit. I also can’t stand artificial sweeteners.

So I was looking forward to trying Canada Dry Lemon-Lime Club Soda, which I finally did today. It’s not sweet in the slightest, but it’s cold and bubbly. It’s also not salty or bitter like other club soda’s I’ve tried.

I still prefer Ginger Ale, but for now while I’m cutting back on sugar I think this will be a satisfactory alternative. 😉

At least according to when I received my text message tweets from the PAX twitter account

Here I was, riding my Motorcycle down the road, heading to lunch with the wife. From my pocket, I can hear Moto Assist yell out from my Moto G that I received a new text from Twitter.

I only follow one account in Twitter and that’s the PAX feed. I didn’t think it would be the registration text since only last week we were told….

@Official_PAX: To assuage any heart attacks, just remember we won’t launch tix until later in May.

It’s only May 7th, which I wouldn’t consider “later in May”.

Once I get to the restaurant I check the message and see this…

@Official_PAX: PAX PRIME 2015 BADGES ARE ON SALE NOW!

WTF!! I am not prepared for this. I click the link and hope I’m not too late (it’s now 4 minutes after I received the alert). Luckily, I wasn’t. After a 20 minute wait, I got in and ordered two sets of tickets. I tried to order 2 more sets using my wife’s phone, but by the time I got though, Saturday was sold out. I guess I lucked out this time around.